17 Saturday May 2014
Posted in Ooops!
Is your repository or ejournal system backed up, off-campus? A bona fide bot at Emory University in Atlanta has accidentally repartitioned then reformated all university-managed computers. All of them. For good measure, it then installed a new operating system onto the wiped systems. So… back up to always-reliable cloud servers? It seems they might not be so reliable. Then, there’s the pesky risk of an EMP…
27 Thursday Feb 2014
Posted in Ooops!, Spotted in the news
Interesting sidelight from the THES, on the new UK trial of public access to 8,000 commercial paywall journals…
the terms of use of the scheme expressly forbid the use of papers accessed through it for “commercial research”.
So perhaps not so useful for business research as had been hoped.
Access is to journals from Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, T&F, through selected public libraries in the more affluent parts of the UK.
05 Wednesday Feb 2014
Posted in Ooops!
Google Search has effectively just de-indexed most of the DOAJ, due to the DOAJ’s recent switch to a new dynamic results approach which did away with 1.4m Google-friendly static HTML pages.
Just before Christmas: 1.4m pages, including individual article records…
Today: 16 pages indexed…
11 Monday Jun 2012
Posted in Ooops!
An odd comment on JURN by Peter D. Verheyen (of The Book Arts Web), 19th May…
Jurn.org is good for finding articles, but does nothing to actually deliver and serve the actual content
It’s surely a simple matter of clicking on the links to get the full text. For instance, all the PDFs of Peter’s Bonefolder magazine are linked, in the first page of search results for “Bonefolder”.
23 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in Ooops!
The Wellcome Trust recently sent scientist Johann Hoog to the BBC for two weeks. Among other things, she learned that…
“BBC journalists do not have access to any scientific journals except for the journal Nature and New Scientist magazine.”
I guess someone needs to break the news to them about open access?
30 Sunday Oct 2011
Posted in JURN's Google watch, Ooops!
Google Search’s second-guessing of what I’m searching for seems to be getting worse. Look at this foul example for: authors india copyright
What kind of idiot bot assumes “india” means “and”?
21 Wednesday Sep 2011
Posted in Ooops!
The Open Knowledge Foundation adds a “Website for finding and searching OA humanities journals” to its Ideas Incubator.
22 Wednesday Dec 2010
Posted in JURN's Google watch, Ooops!
Spamming Google Scholar. Very possible, or so it seems…
“…we conducted several tests on Google Scholar. The results show that academic search engine spam is indeed – and with little effort – possible: We increased rankings of academic articles on Google Scholar by manipulating their citation counts; Google Scholar indexed invisible text we added to some articles, making papers appear for keyword searches the articles were not relevant for; Google Scholar indexed some nonsensical articles we randomly created with the paper generator SciGen; and Google Scholar linked to manipulated versions of research papers that contained a Viagra advertisement.”
Beel, J. (2010)
Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it.
Journal of Electronic Publishing 13 (3), December 2010.
21 Friday May 2010
How to bypass the Great Censorship Wall of Australia…
“The brief? To teach your grandma to bypass the Internet filter.”
16 Saturday Jan 2010
Posted in Ooops!, Spotted in the news
I suppose a further question is, does it extend beyond the sciences…?
“The latest in a string of high-profile academic fraud cases in China […] Several sources revealed to Nature that roughly one-third of more than 6000 scientists surveyed across six top institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification, or fabrication.”
It seems it’s probably just as well that no independent open-access ejournals are allowed in mainland China, since otherwise they would have been easily available to researchers in the West.